Little update on the last post I made about a few new buys as I had a couple of emails asking how they are panning out.

The catch for £40 free-animations.co.uk did £486 in Oct. 75,000 visitors

It’s fairly important to point out this wasn’t just catching an expired domain and parking it, I bought the old site and put it back together. It’s not the first time I have done this, quite a few years ago I bought the domain globalspine.net from a domainer after it had expired, I then used archive & google to track down the old owners who were in New Zealand and I think from memory paid them $2000 for a full copy of the old site and put it back together. Free Animations I could see used to have thousands of pages/files so was an obvious candidate and if I had not caught it for £40 I’d have been happy to spend a few hundred trying to buy it.

Nine Planets has been rocking and has hit £240 in a single day, should be an interesting 12 months with this titan. Leaving it to get some numbers & data on it before deciding for sure the way forward.

I bought Protect.co.uk last month – which could really work well for a variety of angles, children’s safety, alarms, insurance so I think has a lot of value but not an obvious product generic, still cost a few thousand though! A cheap addition was Ski Insurance for a few hundred.

.org.uk domains are really beginning to rise in value and selling for mid £x,xxx, simple economics with supply & demand and with some of the best .co.uk unlikely to get developed or ever sold people are turning to the next best thing which is .org.uk and offers the exact same ability to rank, now would be a good time to buy a category killer and I secured furniture.org.uk which I will come back to in another post, also managed to get something done with SJ.co.uk in the meantime.

On the website front I bought CeramicsToday.com which I found was dead & de-listed from Google, contacted the owner and bought the domain and then negotiated a copy of most of the content, lots of dead pages still and a bit messy but now back in google and traffic at around 700/day, I can see that ending up around 1-2k a day traffic wise. Across all my sites for the last month the traffic stands at 2,787,605 which kind of blew my mind when I added it up.

Found a company doing a novel new trick, well new to me anyway.

They scanned my authority website for dead links
Then put up some content relative to my dead outbound links on their own site
Then email and ask if they can quote my site with link back to me (naturally I agree)
When I confirm it’s ok they tell me about the dead link saying they know how hard it is to run large important sites and monitor everything and offer their (new) page as an alternative link.

I can see that working for them.

I have been busy looking at existing sites & traffic so taken a break from domain research.

Life Insurance Quotes continues to age and is now taking leads, this site is moving forward to the point it’s probably earning just into 4 figures a month, also picked up a couple of other insurance quotes names like travelinsurancequotes.co.uk as that type of traffic seems to convert better and be more valuable than any other. A lovely little set.

Picked up a few expired domains, one in particular last week came good free-animations.co.uk which cost £40 – I tracked down the old owner and offered him a token amount for the old website – he was happy for me to have it so put it back together and it’s doing 2000 visitors and £10 in Adsense per day with no other work done to it.

The big move recently was buying a site I spotted a couple of years ago – NinePlanets.org which is a guide to the solar system with dedicated pages to the moon, Neptune and even a kids astronomy area.

I approached the owner who built it over the last decade but he didn’t want to give any stats and wanted $100,000, so I left it, but it nagged away at me because I knew it was a monster with potential, the owner had a little adsense at the top and right hand side but I knew it’s CTR would be horrendous, I left it a year and approached him again in March 2010 but again the owner wanted $100,000 and wanted me to buy it for the love of it and not income. This time I managed to get some analytics stats, it did 5.5 million visitors in the previous 12 months, this is a site that bombs in the summer but makes up for it outwith that. Now I knew it averaged around 15,000 visitors per day.

The good thing about having a diverse selection of sites is that I already have some science & study related sites so I could do my own numbers, averaging a 1% CTR on page impressions I worked out the site could earn £17k a year, at 2% CTR on page impressions I guestimated around £32000 a year. That was enough to go ahead in my book, even though it’s the most money I have ever spent on buying a site and I was buying it kind of blind it still seemed too good value when everything was weighed up. A final purchase price of just under the $100,000 was agreed and Escrow completed last week.

It’s been fun watching the numbers rolling in, early indications show the site can do £150 a day in Adsense during the week and even with the summer blip I reckon without improvements it could do £40-£50,000 a year so pay itself back in 12-16 months without getting into affiliate product sales, subs and direct advertiser deals, not bad at all. I have also found out the site used to have twice as much traffic a few years ago so really does have potential to improve.

So two acquisitions that could not be further apart in price but I love the thrill of the chase and working on a great deal, it gives me a buzz at £40 or into tens of thousands, I’m certainly in acquisition mode just now – working on tools to find undervalued or forgotten about sites and buying them, the same as I did with domains for a period of time, both areas still offer huge opportunity for profit every single day.

Last year I travelled loads and did more conferences than I care to remember (I was out of the country for over 3 months in total). This year, I’ve been a lot more choosy about which which events I’ve attended based on the benefit (and enjoyment) I’d get from them.

So far I’ve done both Think Visibilities, Dom sure knows how to organise awesome events (Jason wrote a cool review about it here, I should do the same but I’ll outsource his instead). And in the summer my daughter and I went to the Existem AM Summer BBQ.

Out of these 3 events I didn’t attend a single complete session! The reason for this is I use events and conferences to network, form relationships and learn and share knowledge with like minded people (your learn a lot more from folk in the after hours than you ever will in a conference session).

So the reason for this post is that next event I’m off to (and likely my last one of the year), is Think Tank in Del Mar, San Diego. This is, and will be my third Think Tank, which I hope shows how important I feel it is. Cost of entry is high at $3,000 for 3 days but every attendee I’ve known has made that back and often many fold over.

I’ve chatted with Doctor David Klein (aka DK) who organises it and we both feel it would benefit from more than one Brit in attendance (I get lonely and home sick), so even tho it’s sold out (think it sold out in the first week it was announced) a few more folk from this side of the pond are welcome. DK has offered an amazing discount to compensate for the cost of having to travel across the pond (he’s asked me not to say how much it is publicly but it’s awesome).

This is an invitation only event so you will need to know me either on or offline as I’ll have to vouch for you. I’m gaining nothing out of promoting this other than hopefully having a fellow countryman to share an awesome experience with. Leave a comment below or drop me a message if interested and I’ll do the introductions.

I could explain what Think Tank is all about but if you’re serious about it I’m sure Google will do a better job

Starting to really have fun this year, doing tests, trials and punts and really enjoying dabbling in all sorts.

Pretty much all the proceeds from the sale of tvs.co.uk have been re-invested in my businesses. Looking up travel names using the Google keyword tool for inspiration ‘turkey holidays’ stood out as a good name, this seems to be compounded by recent news that UK folks are seeking different destinations like Turkey & Egypt instead of the normal Spanish breaks. turkeyholidays.co.uk was owned by a couple but the email on their one page website bounced, I love it when that happens! seriously I do, it’s like a challenge and while I have no skills when it comes to design or coding the one thing I am good at is research and I am persistent.

Snail mail failed, email failed, the same address was used by a glass company who’s email failed, I did manage to find a planning application by the couple in Nov ‘09 which used a different home address so used it and was successful in getting an email back from them, managed to buy the domain for £3k. It also came with the old hosting account and email account which had 5 attempts to buy it from the different people before the old email address filled up and started bouncing. The perseverance paid off in the end.

Picked up Yacht.co.uk for £1750 which would strike me as being worth 10x that, nice name.

Bought a few websites, some on a multiple like Optillusions.com which is an older site showing optical illusions – bought for £12k, it earned £740 in July, this one freaked out my son (and me) a bit

Also bought a small site which ranks no.1 in Google for tropical fish, the tropical fish centre was an older lead, it can often pay to leave money on the table. I offered the previous owner £1500 a couple of years ago and moved up to £3500 but the actual amount didn’t seem to be the stumbling point, more the fact it was a decade’s work and sentimental value so I left the offer on the table and a year or so later he finally came back to me and was ready to sell for £4000. Seemed like an ok sort of number, not overly a bargain but I was sure I could get my money back within 2 to 3 years so bought it blind as there was no income. It’s earning around £7 per day so looks like under 2 years it’ll be paid back and is making amazon sales which could help further.

LifeInsuranceQuotes.co.uk is in development along with quite a few other insurance names in a joint venture, it was sitting on page 2 and not in use as the company primarily worked offline, a real bargain waiting to be picked up.

There are a lot of other things I am doing which I can’t go into unfortunately but just from the above over the last month or so it’s clear there are still a lot of bargains & good deals for domain names and established websites, although it should be noted none of the above were listed for sale anywhere so you really have to do the research and send emails & letters which can be boring but the pay off is fun!

It’s been an interesting year so far for me, not overly eventful before last week, but nice growth income wise and some new sites and names purchased along the way. A geography site for $10k is another seasonal site that does poorly during the summer hols but good addition overall with healthy stats.

My strategy hasn’t really changed much along the way, buy some good names, lease some, develop some, keep some and buy older established and neglected websites. A month ago I had a phone call from Sedo to discuss putting the domain TVs.co.uk into their retail auction. Some of you will remember I bought TVs.co.uk for £1000 back in Dec ‘07.

I had some fun with the name and had it at no.2 in Google for a while and then managed to get the name banned altogether for a bit which was careless due to not double checking everything that was going on, quite funny now thinking back but a little unsettling when one of your best domains get banned, then got it back in and into the top 10-20 in Google again, made a few TV sales but it’s never really been developed properly, short attention span, impatience and lack of skills to blame really.

Later on Sedo themselves valued the name at around £22,000 so when they spoke on the phone they wanted the name entered in the retail auction with a £25k reserve which I declined, a little later I was advised they would accept TVs & PCs at a £49k reserve each so I decided no harm and to my surprise TVs.co.uk sold last Thursday for £51,000 – the domain has been paid for and transferred so job done and a nice pot to re-invest in earning sites.

Apart from that I picked up QuadBikes.co.uk domain for £2500 after months of negotiation, oh and GadgetInsurance.com was listed for sale for just a couple of hundred dollars when I typed it into my browser so after getting re-assurance I wasn’t going mad that was snapped up and is in development with a friend.

I’m still working on a few things which are going incredibly slowly but would make great posts if/when they ever come off, I hate waiting.

This is a write up by Martijn Beijk of the presentation I did at a4uExpo last year. It was originally posted on SearchEngineCowboys but has for various reasons has been lost so Martijn gave me permission to share it here.

At the A4U Expo in the Amsterdam RAI there was a session by Al Carlton, a Selfmade millionaire by just blogging and smart thinking. Al Carlton (Coolest Media Ltd. ,Coolest-Gadgets.com) has started blogging not too long ago – he told us with his lips still a bit dry from the party the night before.

He is convinced you can basically sell anything to people and shows some examples of stormtrooper outfits ( ! ), electronic bikes which were sold for a couple of thousand pounds and ‘the ultimate guide to anal sex for women’ which was doing particularly good.

He describes the approaches he used to generate traffic. Lots of traffic.

Traffic generation (social):

Use social bookmarking websites and convert social traffic from digg, reddit, etc to regular readers and vice versa. Use other blogs and comments. Engange in forums, directories and place articles on news websites. make sure you get those links out there.

Blogs want free content. So write articles for other blogs to increase your own traffic! But be careful. Don’t push yourself to another blog. Be useful to the specific niche/blog/site.

Traffic generation (search):

Al cannot stress enough that you need quality content. Write good articles that people find (trust)worthy and optimize. To Al, SEO is providing information the visitor wants. Simple as that.

Traffic generation (buy/trade):

network with other bloggers, write articles, attend conferences (like A4UExpo! ), use free coupons (for facebook, adwords, MSN, etc!)

and use PPC to convert for short or long term profit

Traffic generation (direct):

Regular readers, bookmarks, RSS subscribers, Email subscribers. Quote:”RSS is for techies. Email is for all other people!”

Now that we have discussed traffic sources, what about our revenue streams?

Use CPM, CPC, affiliate sales, direct sales, paid reviews, or even sell out your blog (partially). But there were some more good tips from Al here; hide adsense from your social readers! They know what adsense looks like and it doesn’t work for them. Another good tip: when younotice an advertiser targeting your website via adsense (content network) – Contact them directly! Cut out Google and get some good deals with the advertiser directly.

Contextual adverts:

· Adsense
· Chitika
· Kontera

The Pro’s:
· east to implement
· targeting

The Con’s:
· you are paid to lose visitors.
· can deter visitors.
· you are not in control of what is being shown.

Affiliate revenue:

You are in total control of how you link, make sure you find a profitable offer and PUSH.

Al warns us about link sales or paid reviews -be very careful. Google is watching and doesn’t like it, so don’t get caught…)

Optimisation:

A day has only hot 24 hours and you need to spend at least a few of them in the pub – the message here is that you need to outsource as much as you can. Al himself does some research and comes up with a business plan for a hopefully succesful idea and outsources everything, from design to coding and even content creation (but don’t cut corners and make sure it is unique and of high quality!). Webmaster Tools, Social sites, long tail traffic and related posts are ways to optimise your traffic stream. To get the best revenue available he says you really need to make deals with the merchants and make direct deals. Use different ads on different content and push those appropriate affiliate offers. Target your visitors geographically. Review your old posts and find new ways to monetize them. Another free tip: after a month, remove the date from your articles, it will make your content look fresh.

The million dollar blogging session at the underestimated A4U expo was well worth visiting and had some really good tips and Al sure knew how to make people laugh.

Sort of a guest post by Martijn Beijk.

I’ve written before about using a custom plugin to automatically convert links to affiliate links when an appropriate scheme is available and it has certainly boosted my revenue over the years. So I was very interested to hear from Skimlinks who offer a product that does the job for you. 

Skimlinks uses Javascript to automatically redirect appropriate links (redirection can be done via your own subdomain which makes it much more integrated to your site). You don’t need to be a member of any specific affiliate scheme, Skimlinks receives the commission, takes their slice and pays you directly. In theory they should be able earn a higher percentage from merchants thus absorbing their percentage however from my tests I’ve not seen this.

Reports show have many clicks and sales you are generating each day and also to which merchants. I find the merchant report really useful as it shows you affiliate programs You may previously of missed and should consider joining. It honours any affiliate links you already so won’t reduce existing affiliate revenue.

Pros
- Another revenue stream with minimal time investment
- Cloaks affiliate links 
- Reporting
- New merchants are continually being added (8,000+ so far)

Cons
- pages load another external JS file
- Lose a percentage of commission

I already do a fair amount of affiliate sales on CG so wasn’t expecting to find many programs that I’m not yet a member. However after 10 days of testing reports showed nearly 2,000 clicks from 138 different merchants, wow. Revenue was somewhat disappointing at £61, though for the amount of effort involved and just redoing existing links you can’t really grumble.

I’d certainly recommend giving Skimlinks a try, for both the revenue and reports which could highlight an attractive scheme that you’ve missed. If you implement it please let us know how you get on.

There are currently over 400 million active users on Facebook, which is somewhat insane. Last month Facebook became my 4th largest traffic source (admittedly it is ‘currently’ quite away behind the top 3). Before reading on I suggest becoming a fan here so you can see what I’m writing about.

I’ve always been a huge fan of building lists and subscribers to my various sites, it removes some of the reliance on search engines and gives you a bit more stability. Using my site coolest gadgets as an example we currently have around ~69K RSS and 10K email subscribers. When speaking to people outside of the industry, only a small percentage know what RSS actually is never mind using it, however even my technophobic father has heard of Facebook, so around 9 months ago I started looking at building a list on Facebook.

Creating a FaceBook Page
Make sure you’re logged into Facebook, go here, click “Create Page” and follow then follow the simple wizard. You’ll need to create a logo, add links in to your site and write a simple description but nothing too challenging. Next up we need to populate your page, you can either make daily posts yourself, pay somebody to do it or if your site has an RSS feed you can automate.

I’m currently using RSS Graffitti (thank you Zath, Clarke and Keith for the recommendation). This will automatically post a thumbnail and excerpt on your pages wall whenever a new post is published on your site. This will then link to the relevent page on your site, like so

You now have a fully automated page and source of traffic on one of the most popular sites on the web, cool.

Promoting Your Fan Page
The first thing you need to do is get 25 fans so that you can claim your vanity URL, I’d suggest manually mailing friends to become a fan, explaining why and personalise your messages a bit. Once you have 25 fans head here and claim a more human friendly URL for your fan page.

I’ve tried a few different methods promoting Coolest Gadgets fan page, the following graph shows how it’s grown since inception

1 – Did a blog post saying we are now on Facebook
2 – LG kindly donated a LCD TV as a competition prize, to enter the contest readers had to become a fan or tweet about it (hence promoting the competition more).
3 – Did another blog post about the contest, this time keeping it really simple: Fan on Facebook? Then Stand A Chance to Win 42″ LG LCD TV
4 – We announced the winner
5 – The site was redesigned with much more prominence on becoming a facebook fan, including a banner advertising the page and a widget showing current fans (see right).

If you have the funds you can also promote the page using Facebook ads, as you can target based on peoples interests this can be highly effective.

My aim is to build the fan base up to 6,000+ by Christmas and promote various offers and discounts when available. If you’re not a fan (or friend) yet feel free to add me.

If you don’t have a fan page yet I’d suggest investing an hour of your time and creating yourself a new traffic source, let us know if you do and we’ll link them from here.

Hi all, it’s been a while since I posted, basically been crazily busy with both business and life in general. I enjoyed and spoke at another Think Visibility conference at the weekend, awesome group of people with some great speakers.

I spoke on outsourcing and automation, a subject I’m pretty passionate about and I think it went okay, so I’ve shared the slides above, any questions at all post in the comments and I’ll go into more detail. I’ve also done a round up of what other people have posted and some of the most important links:

• oDesk – Site lets you build and manage an entire virtual team to build your business
• 10 tips on using oDesk to outsource your life – By SEOIdiot
• ProBlogger Job Board – Great and cheap way of finding freelance bloggers
• Top 7 Things I Learnt at Think Visibility III
• Think Visibility mentions on Twitter
• Five reasons why Think Visibility rocked
• Think Visibility – from the other side of the hangover
• Think Visibility Conference 2010 – David Towers
• Think Visibility Photos by Affiliate Window
• #thinkvisibility 3 round up by SEOIdiot, hahaha

Any others please let me know and I’ll add links to them here